A variety of sports have centered around devices which enable a man to travel rapidly across a ground surface using low friction devices mounted on his feet. Examples of such sports are ice skating, snow skiing, roller skating, and most recently, skateboarding. The present invention addresses long-standing problems involving training in difficult techniques of snow skiing utilizing technology from the more recently developed sport of skateboarding.
Training systems for snow skiing require application in a non-snow environment for wide and year round application. The wheeled device is ideal for practicing on dry ground. Most wheeled devices, however, of which skateboards are a significant example, differ radically in the techniques involved in turning while using the devices. Skateboards are typically ridden using a fore and aft placement of the rider's feet and developing radical turning moments by leaning the rider's body weight in the direction of the turn causing the skateboard platform to incline sharply into the direction of the turn. Such sharp angles of inclination are enabled by the relatively high vertical distance that the board is supported above the ground. Snow skis by contrast, are much closer to the ground, to the point that the bottom surface is in actual contact with the ground. The incline of the platform into the turn in skiing and the rider's body positions required to initiate and sustain turns, in addition to downhill side slip involved in skiing, provides few, if any, correlations with skateboarding techniques. A typical skateboard device is disclosed for example in Stevenson, skateboard with inclined foot depressable lever, U. S. Pat. No. 3,565,454.
Other attempts to provide a wheeled dry land skiing trainer have been complex for example Sessa, wheeled ski skate, U.S. Pat. No. 3,891,225, and involving unique hardware which diminishes the correlation with actual skiing movements or have, like skateboards, been supported at relatively high distances from the ground, for instance, Kunselman, roller skiis, U.S. Pat. No. 3,436,088, destroying their correlation with actual skiing movements as described above.